As usual, it struck me that letters were the only really satisfactory form of literature. They give one the facts so amazingly, don't they? I felt when I got to the end that I'd lived for years in that set. But oh dearie me I am glad that I'm in it!
My name is Percy Jackson. I'm twelve years old. Until a few months ago, I was a boarding student at Yancy Academy, a private school for troubled kids in upstate New York. Am I a troubled kid? Yeah. You could say that.
I'd spent way more years worrying about how to look like a poet -- buying black clothes, smearing on scarlet lipstick, languidly draping myself over thrift-store furniture -- than I had learning how to assemble words in some discernible order.
Logically, I understand that it wasn't Edward's fault my family fell apart after he left. But when you're eleven years old, you don't give a flip about logic. You just really miss holding your big brother's hand.
You can learn more in half an hour's direct contact with a source of knowledge (no matter the apparent reason for the contact or the subject of the transaction) than you can in years of formal effort.
Live long enough and nothing is news. 'The News' is 'the new things.' That's fine, until a hundred years go by and you realise there are no new things, only deep structures and cycles that repeat themselves through different period details.
His special gift was the ability to see the essence of a worthwhile suggestion and to relate it to what was already in existence or planned. Then he would encourage and shape the new project, repeatedly redesigning the curriculum so that a new depart...
Don’t you know that’s what college is about...students spending years gathering useless information they’ll never use again, going hopelessly into debt, just so they feel smarter than the rest of their family? I mean, that’s why I worked so h...
What virtue is there in a man who demonstrates goodness because he has been bred to it? It is his habit from youth. But a man who has known unkindness and want, for him to be kind and charitable to those who have been the cause of his misfortunes, th...
...I've spent the last fifteen years of my life railing against the game of soccer, an exercise that has been lauded as "the sport of the future" since 1977. Thankfully, that future dystopia has never come.
Because when you’re a 23-year old party girl who has to pee you don’t really think about the possibility that your nerdy bouncer friend might suddenly start acting like a trench-coated pedophile who flashes kids at the park.
She tapped out a beat on the edge of the piano as I tripped and plummeted through the refrain of “Spacebar,” trying to translate the synth chords into a piano bit on the fly. It had been a million years since I’d played it. But it was still cat...
If I have learned anything over this last year it’s that you have to live your own life too so that if something we hoped for doesn’t work out, you still have two legs to stand on, you still have your own path.
Take any two-year-old through a car wash and their skulls are blown. FLAPS! FOAM! ROLLING THINGS! It's the closest they'll ever get to being inside a working spaceship.
Nothing made sense. Every decision felt wrong. Every direction I looked led down a path I was unaware about. For years I have worked toward one goal, stayed focused on one place I wanted to get. But now that goal felt like it wasn't quite right.
I stumbled away. I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth and just looked at him. "What was that?" His chest rose and fell heavily. "A kiss." "Why?" "Why?" He laughed. His blue eyes suddenly looked so sad. "Because I've wanted to do that for twenty ...
I have no auditory depth perception. She said, “I love you,” and I couldn’t even tell if she was 300 miles away, or 6 feet below my feet and 300 years away.
I've managed to bring the backlog down to a mere sixty-eight years," she announced with some small sense of achievement. "I hope to be able to start marking the papers of pupils who are still alive by the end of the decade.
Twenty years is, after all, a long time. We are not the same people we were. Old friends, lovers, even family members: they are strangers who happen to wear a familiar face. We have no right to claim to know anyone after such a distance.
First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys. Not that all months aren't rare. But one strange year, halloween came early....don't you ditch me jim nightshade...don't talk death. Someone might hear...
However...," Satan said. Bick sighed. "However, I didn't count on the growing interference of lawyers, regulators, bureaucrats and politicians into my business. I swear it seems that every year they stick their noses into more and more." Lucifer chuc...